It was 54 years ago today that Robert F. Kennedy died, one of the few assassinations that truly changed history.
It doesn’t matter who killed him or why, but Kennedy’s death gave us Richard Nixon as president, five more years of the Vietnam War and probably even the horror of Ronald Reagan and his aftermath.
Imagine an America in which Nixon was never president and Watergate never happened.
That alone would have changed so much.
People who don’t like Bobby point out that he worked for Joe McCarthy in the ’50s and was ruthless in support of his older brother into the ’60s. But I can think of very few American political figures who matured and changed for the better as he did.
He was the only candidate in my lifetime who could appeal both to the white working class and to African-Americans. Half a century after his death, his picture still hangs in many homes along with his brother John and Martin Luther King.
I think his brother Ted’s eulogy pretty well sums up what Bobby meant to us.
“He gave us strength in time of trouble, wisdom in time of uncertainty, and sharing in time of happiness. He will always be by our side. Love is not an easy feeling to put into words. Nor is loyalty, or trust, or joy. But he was all of these. He loved life completely and he lived it intensely.”
And then the closing that has shown up in countless video clips:
“My brother need not be idealized, or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life; to be remembered simply as a good and decent man, who saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it, Those of us who loved him and who take him to his rest today, pray that what he was to us and what he wished for others will some day come to pass for all the world. As he said many times, in many parts of this nation, to those he touched and who sought to touch him.
“Some men see things as they are and say why. I dream things that never were and say why not.”
Bobby Kennedy only lived to be 42 years old.
It’s easy to look at Nixon and Reagan and Donald Trump and say only the good die young, and there is no doubt in my mind this would be a very different country if Bobby had lived to be 80 or 85 or 90.
Sadly, we will never know how different.
And that is the tragedy.